


Creation

by mresundance



Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein - Nick Dear
Genre: Animal Death, Changing Tenses, F/M, Gen, POV Female Character, POV First Person, Past Tense, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-16
Updated: 2012-09-16
Packaged: 2017-11-14 08:33:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/513319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mresundance/pseuds/mresundance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I did not know a fire had begun in the forest of your heart; a fire that would eat up every root and every branch and every trunk, every good, green thing within you." Elizabeth's point of view.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Creation

**Author's Note:**

> I read the novel and watched the Nick Dear version. Each time I felt like Elizabeth might have more to say. Also, there are few characters in literature I despise more than Victor Frankenstein.

## 1.

Slowly, ever so slowly; his yellow eyes flicker in the gloom and rain rattles the windows.

Once I saw a tree after it had been stricken by lightning. He reminds me of that tree: twisted and disfigured, a creature robbed of life and reanimated by something altogether unnatural. He is so close, so near, I can almost taste the pallor of his skin. It's like lettuce leaf: half translucent, veins visible. He smells of rain, of fumes; of ash like a furnace. Like old bad books and little broken bird wings.

## 2.

You were so pale, even as a child. A bone-white boy with great, grave eyes animated by an unearthly internal fire. The same kind of fire that lights the eyes of pilgrims, of martyrs and madmen. 

"I will find the secrets of nature. Of life itself, Elizabeth," you told me once. 

"And when you have discovered this secret, what will you do?" I asked you in jest. I did not know then that the look in your eyes was anything but mere enthusiasm or curiosity. 

But you were so dear to me! When I found myself orphaned, your parents rescued me. As in a fairy tale, they bore me away. I left a life where I had been alone and came into a life luxuriant with the love of your parents and your brothers. I could not believe that the boy whose family became my own would be anything but good. 

Victor Frankenstein. I kissed the crown of your head every evening before we were sent to bed. You smelled sweetly of old books of alchemy, of dust, nothing sinister. 

You did not answer my taunt about finding the secret of life with words, but with a smirk.

## 3.

The creature's hands in my hair are enormous, proportions well beyond human. His fingers are rank and half-rotted, nails like parchment. He pulls my braids and my wedding veil. He says my hair is beautiful; something in his fearsome expression softens. He places both his hands upon my collarbone. Though they lie slack, conveying only heaviness and not malevolence, they burn hot as pokers.

I hear your footsteps upstairs. So does the creature. His great frame crumples and he sighs and heaves, covering his malformed face in his hands. 

"Why does he have such a beautiful thing?" the creature says, sounding hollow and wretched.

## 4.

Tufts of bloodied feathers falling to the ground like snow.  
It was in that bleak, dismal summer, when everything smelled like sulfur and tasted like chalk. The sun shone red and sore as a festering wound in a soot-grey sky and the world entire felt as if it were burning. 

"It is volcanism," you declared one morning. 

"There are no volcanoes in Switzerland," I replied.

"No, from _Greece_ ," you had sneered. " _Obviously_."

That same morning a swallow struck the kitchen window, then lay trembling and dazed in the parched garden grass. You picked her up, not caring if she was hurt or confused or frightened. You began pulling her wings, her little legs, tugging and prodding until she squeaked. 

"Leave her, Victor," I said. 

You ran your fingers down her spine and she struggled. 

"Please stop, you will harm her!"

When you looked at me, your eyes were ablaze. I did not know a fire had begun in the forest of your heart; a fire that would eat up every root and every branch and every trunk, every good, green thing within you.

You released her, receding into silence, eyes yet transfixed on the bird while she made tentative hops round the garden. 

I have tried to forget this, as I have forgotten some of you other experiments, Victor. I have tried. I have told myself that I love you and love should supersede such things, should it not? 

I do not remember why I left you for those few moments. There was no-one else at hand; mother and father and our brothers were all gone to the market and the servants were engaged in their work and errands, or, pretended not to hear. 

The swallow screamed and blood and feathers stuck in gory clumps to your childish hands. I do not remember when I heard her, or when I ran out to the garden, or for how long I shouted at you. My voice was raw and shriveled when you finally dropped the swallow, discarding that half-naked and broken body as if it were nothing more than refuse. 

"It was an experiment," you said, face puckered and sullen.

There were times I have believed this memory to be a dream, some nightmare my imagination conjured up. But I remember. I have remembered all along. 

You were ten.

## 5.

Mother had bound us all. When she died it was like the tendons and sinew of a body snapping, the joints of our family coming apart. 

Father had been the bones. He seemed hard and unbending, until the death of dear William, coupled with your long absences and your madness, finally fractured him. Father couldn't hold this family together either. 

And perhaps William was a lung and when he died we were without breath. 

I became the heart after mother died. I imagined myself trying to feed blood and life to everyone. I felt it in me, a desire like a flame. I only wanted to create something whole from the pieces. 

This is why I married you. 

This is why I tried to love you.

I didn't want to take life apart so much as sew life together.

## 6.

His blackened lips against mine. His voice dark, fathoms deep and words flow out of him like water, like a poem. It shocks me that such a rough, misshapen creature has such eloquence. It shocks me so that I do not hear what he is saying for a moment.

"He abandoned me," he concludes. "He left me."

 _He_ meaning _you_ , of course. And I find I cannot answer this miserable creature, Victor. I find I cannot object to his characterization of you, creator and destroyer. 

He bares his teeth and seizes my throat with his hands.

## 7.

I see flame in his eyes, too, scalding him from the inside out. 

Does he crouch in the cold woods at night, as I used to when I was an orphan? Before either of our lives intersected with you?

His yellow eyes are like lanterns and slowly, so slowly -- his hands on my throat and jaw make the world jerk, then stop.


End file.
